Oh, man, I do not feel good.
It could be that I stayed up to 3 o' clock last night playing Guitar Hero. Or it could quite well be that my father is forcing me to write this blog when I should be lying in bed.
It's probably the Guitar Hero. Ah, Guitar Hero. What a game. I believe that Guitar Hero may very well be the most annoying game of our generation. Not only does it have nothing to do with playing the actual guitar, it has skewed rhythm and faulty controls. The music isn't even that nice. A while back, I had read an article written by a mother attempting to be 'cool', thanking Guitar Hero for introducing the songs she loved to a new generation. However, there are many other, less mind-numbing things that already accomplish that very same purpose. For example, Pandora Internet Radio can show them that music, without deluding them that they are some kind of Guitar Genius superstar. Another is, quite possibly, THEIR PARENTS. If they want their kid to know about their music so badly, just play it. If the REALLY like it, then they will listen, whether their parents play it or not.
All in all, Guitar Hero makes me angry.
If only it wasn't so fun.

Sahir's Ramblings: Now With More Sacrilege Than Ever Before!

Creationism doesn't seem very believable. Neither does any form of Christianism. I figure, if they're going to make an entire belief system, the least they could do is make it believable! It's a wonder that they managed to completely convert such a huge amount of people. It makes me question their methods of conversion. All they did was have Jesus do a magic trick and call him the Son of God. Why was that so convincing? The same thing goes for Scientology. First of all, the entire Religion was begun by a Science Fiction Writer. Most of its famous members are just in it for the free publicity, and those that aren't are just plain gullible. If your 'theton levels' are high enough, they divulge to you so called 'secret' information on this religion, many of the events of which take place in space, largely involving the Galactic Federation, a group comprised of the most powerful figures in the galaxy, such as Xemu. It really is unbelievable how people can buy these kinds of things. Not to say that Scientologists should not be respected. People just have to accept that these kinds of people exist. That it is what they believe, and there is no swaying them from their paths. You shouldn't ridicule or disrespect the people that believe in these things. It truly is impossible. Impossible and nothing less. Belief is one of the strongest things in the world, so when trying to think of swaying people's beliefs, remember.
Don't waste your breath.

Road Trips and Cuba

In four years, I will spend my summer going on a road trip. Yes, a road trip. No ordinary road trip, I'll have you know. This road trip will fulfill the cycle. Once this trip is complete, there is nothing more I must do. It will be the end. I suppose you are confused at this point. Don't worry. All will be explained in time. I will start with the destinations of this trip. We will first visit California. California. What springs to mind when you think of this place? For me, it is the home of modern punk music, for my friends, it is essentially a giant den filled with beautiful women. One of the lesser paradises of the world, California is a necessity for every road trip. Afterward, we will drive in a straight line past Arizona, to Colorado, where we shall be provided lodgings by one of my friend's uncles, and view the Grand Canyon. I did not want to do this, but I could not fight the combined force of five of my friends. We shall move on from there downwards to Mexico, stopping in Tijuana, camping in the country, and then moving on. We then continue onwards, taking a slowboat to Cuba. Cuba. What an original experience. For a LONG time, only a few select outsiders have been allowed to set foot inside Cuba. But now that a certain dictator has loosened his iron vice grip on all of the immigration, a whole new array of possiblities open up. Yes. Our trip is almost finished. At our final stop, my pilgrimage will be complete. Finally, we arrive! Cancun!

Canada's Sweet Siren Song

Canada. For several years I have dreamed of this place. Constantly living under the shadow of America, Canada could never escape from the reputation of being 'America Jr.', always being regarded as a country filled with wimp hippies and retired couples, but that is not the truth. I can see past this silly reputations and view the real Canada. A paradise, free health care abound, snowy in the winters, scorching in the summers, it is, without a doubt, my Eden. All of my friends have a skeptical view on Canada.
'Oh, who would want to go to Canada? It's too hot and smells like stale marijuana.'
However, whenever they say this, I completely disregard it.
Speaking of which, I know another place that's too hot and smells like stale marijuana. Seattle's premier music festival, Bumbershoot. Yes, glorious Bumbershoot, chock full of all the latest and greatest music acts, taking place in the height of Summer, where none of the good acts come on until well over nine, practically shoving free promotional CD's down your throat, giant roller-coasters beckoning you, begging you to mount their bright red chairs and follow it into death or oblivion (whatever comes first). Yes, two paradises among paradises, Bumbershoot and Canada are. They are where my destiny lies. These places are two thirds of my journey. However, two thirds is not enough! The road to completion awaits! Onward to Cancun!

On The Topics Of Jobs And Existence

I like music. I really like music. If I can, I would like to have a career involving music.
Now before you say 'Oh, how cute! He wants to be in a band!', know that I DO NOT want to make a living PLAYING music. I want to do something with it.
Anything's fine with me. I'll work for a record company, I'll work for a magazine, I'll do anything! That is, if it's possible.
I'm not picky. Any job is fine with me. I don't even have to make that much money. Just enough to support me and my family living in a modest apartment. To be honest, I don't think about my future too much. Not that I should, being thirteen, but everyone puts some thought into it at some point, be it a sophomore thinking about applying to college next year, or even a four year old girl playing doctor in the backyard.
The future is a funny thing to think about. I sometimes think, what if all of a sudden, we just cease to exist. We won't burn up, or disintegrate, or anything painful at all. We simply wouldn't exist. We would never have existed, and would never exist. Just as if there was no universe, no time, no space, nothing. Hell, there wouldn't even be nothing! Simply nothing would exist. And we wouldn't necessarily know when things stopped existing. For example, we could just keep on living in our imaginations. Though nothing would exist, we would believe it does, and live on forever, not knowing if anything is real. Even this blog you feel you are reading could all be in your head. I'm pretty sure some philosopher touched on this topic before, but I can't seem to recall his name.
Anyway, I hope you're sufficiently freaked out.
You are?
Well...

Discrimination!

I watch TV. But not as much as people would think a thirteen year old does.
There are hundreds upon hundreds of irritating and untrue about our age group (one of wich is taht were bad at grammer). People think we sleep extremely late. Well, if you read my previous blog posting you would know otherwise. People also think that we are absolute jerks to our parents. Now, that may be true, but don't WE have a reason? Taking away our video games when we get angry is just like not punishing a pregnant woman because she had mood swings. Is it really OUR fault that we act like this? Is it? No. I hate to do this, but I'm playing the hormones card. Just because our hormones last longer than a pregnant woman's, people blame US for it. It makes me SO MAD!
Oh, and another thing!
You never see people having all these negative stereotypes about women, do you? As far as you know, the worst that could happen is she gets pregnant (And that problem could be easily...corrected). But, oh, no! If anything girls are worse than boys! Girls are always the ones portrayed as having an awkward puberty, but guys have it just as hard. I won't go into the details, but it's those blasted females that are thought to feel self-concious, but if it's anyone that should, it's the men. In movies, all you get to see are the confident quarterbacks and their pretty girl counterparts with low self-esteems. But in real life, it's the other way around! Why do they enjoy such a spotless reputation, while we're only known as sex-crazed, manic tough guys?
In the words of the Tootsie Pops narrator
'The world may never know.'

Sleep

Normally, I don't end up sleeping very much. I'm not sure what my reason for this is, but, one way or another, it just happens. I set my phone alarm for 5:45 in the morning, read until 11:30 or so, and then go to bed. I wake up about ten minutes after the alarm goes off. Once I'm up, I spend maybe fifteen to twenty minutes taking a nice long shower, dozing off a few times in between, go upstairs and make myself a pre-breakfast snack, and maybe read some comics. Once my mom gets up, she makes me breakfast, we watch some TV, and I head off to school with my carpool, sleeping half the way there.
Next year this will all change.
Of course, it's possible that I'll just change carpools and have the same schedule, but with different people. But that wouldn't be very interesting, would it? So, I'll tell you the alternative. I will begin taking the bus. This could quite possibly be disastrous. For one thing, my mother will force me to begin making breakfast for the both of us, which will cause me to wake up EVEN earlier, which will quite easily disrupt my progress in school, which, in turn will make my mother angry. So it's a Lose-Lose situation.
If this indeed happens, there is an EXTREMELY small chance that I would wake up on time most days. I can tell you this because, as it is, I can end up waking up from any time between 4:45 to 6:45. Due to my erratic waking times, I often experience lucid dreams, and NO, that does not mean what you think it means. A lucid dream is when you are dreaming, but your body is completely ready to be awake. Thus, you are aware you are dreaming. This is a very fun state to be in, because you can do ANYTHING. ANYTHING!!! Of course, I can't remember what I did (it was a dream, after all), So I can't tell you. I probably had a point I was going to get to earlier in the blog, but I've lost my train of thought.
This blog is over.

Downtown #3

Once leaving the evil mall, we were bored and wondering why Prince Caspian wasn't finished yet. It had been an hour and a half, after all. So Sam was just wheeling me around, when suddenly and abruptly, the entire back of the chair broke off. I fell backwards and landed painfully on the street. We were so bored, we decided we had nothing better to do than fix the chair. Everyone else sat down and put the free hugs sign to good use. Sam and I decided to visit the officemax in search of a screw we could use to fix the chair. Unfortunately, we couldn't manage to get the proper one require, so we sat down in despair, ate our Subway sandwiches and asked random passerby where we could find some heavy duty glue. Eventually we got our answer in the form of an elderly lady informing us to go back to OfficeMax. So back we went. I really am not sure how this is in any way even possible but the OFFICEMAX was OUT OF GLUE. So we had to get duct tape instead.
Meanwhile...
To put their free hugs sign to good use, the other kids sat down and held up their free hugs sign. Naturally, they got free hugs in return. An adult nearby witnessed this, and decided to start freaking out. Thus, she gave them a twenty minute speech on the dangers of molestation, and quite literally dragged them halfway to the courthouse when they decided to stand up and wrench themselves from the woman's grip, give her a strong telling-to, and walk all the way back to meet us at OfficeMax. So we were back where we started. It had been three and a half hours and our friends still hadn't been released from the vice grip of Prince Caspian. So we got some candy. Sure enough, our Caspian friends, upon not finding us, left and went to their respective houses. Once this was realized, that was it. Our adventure had come to an end.
So it did.
Goodbye.

Downtown #2

As we entered, wheeling the chair along, we were almost immediately noticed by one of the mall staff. He approached us, brow furrowed, staring at the chair.
'You can't have this.'
'Why?'
'You just can't.'
We were stunningly angry at him for this. So much so, we started stamping at the ground. We went so far as to ask to look at the mall rules, and, sure enough, there were no rules against it. This guy was trying to screw us over. Though he said not to, we did what we had thought was the only rational choice. We continued wheeling the chair through the mall. We went up the small group of stairs leading to the elevator, lugging along the chair around behind us. The girls disagreed with our choice, but we really didn't care. Once we were up there, we had visited a few stores. It must have been a site to see, five children visiting feminine clothing stores, carrying a wheeling chair.
We had fun while it lasted. Just a few minutes later, a security guard had somehow gotten word of our misdeeds and scurried quickly through all the clothing stores, searching for a group of kids carrying a chair and a small piece of paper. Eventually, he found us, in Victoria's Secret, no less, and promptly told us to get the chair out of the mall, or else be ejected. Much to the annoyance of everyone else with us, my friend Sam and I were forcibly ejected from the mall. What were we going to do?

Downtown #1

Every now and then, after school, a large group of friends and I walk downtown. We normally see a movie. One such time, a group of about fifteen students, including me, went to see a horror film. However, the movie we wanted to see was not running at the correct time. So instead, my movie-starved friends went to see Prince Caspian.
As most of you know, Prince Caspian is a book from C.S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia. Now these books, though having underlying themes of christianity, are fantastic despite their relentless subliminization. But the movies are different.
Not only do they cut out at least half the content of the original books, they make all of the dark and disturbing parts replaced by scenes with talking rats and mice. So, yeah. I didn't feel like seeing that movie. But that was alright. I had people to hang out with. Ten of my friends went to see Prince Caspian, while the other five of us were left alone. Cold and lonely, carrying a twenty pound wheeled chair. Uh...I can explain.
Earlier this day, three of my friends and I found a chair outside the school with a piece of paper reading 'free' taped to it. When we saw this, a thought sparked into our heads.
At the time we thought it was a brilliant idea to push each other downhill on this chair at alarmingly fast speeds. So we did. Now there were problems with this chair, such as its faulty back (which we later fixed with super glue, but that's a story for another time). This resulted in many painful injuries on our part. We made use of the free paper, of course, as we converted it into a makeshift free hugs sign. A stroke of genius.
So there we were, five seventh grade children wheeling a faulty desk chair around downtown Seattle, leftover Subway sandwiches from lunch clutched tightly in our shivering hands, displaying a halfheartedly made Free Hugs sign proudly.
We were bored.
So we went to a mall.

Noodles

A lot of days, after school, I go down to the convenience store down the street and buy a...uh, cup of Cup Noodles. Not just any Cup Noodles. Korean Cup Noodles. The Korean guy that works at and owns the store always looks at me strangely when I buy them, as if I have no right to buy them if I am not Korean. Don't get me wrong, he was a nice guy, it's just that he was confused. Wouldn't you be if you saw an indian kid walk into a store in Seattle and buy a cup of instant noodles from Korea?
Over the following months, however, I learned, though impressionable, he was a really nice guy. He would make jokes, ask my name, and have conversations with me. It was his wife I had to watch out for. Oh, man, his wife was a jerk.
Once, some friends and I went down to the store to get something to drink, and had noticed that the owner wasn't there. We figured it would be rude to ask who she was, so we were quiet. A few moments later, the owner wandered out of the back, whispered something in his wife's ear, kissed her, and went back inside. We assumed she was his wife.
Anyway, we were taking a while choosing our sodas, and she had gotten angry and impatient with us, and started yelling for us to hurry up. So, we picked up the pace and chose our drinks quickly. One of my friends had some kind of problem with drinking from a can, and asked her if he could get a cup for himself. The wife, just to spite us for taking too long, denied him the cup. 'No cup for you!'
So Isaiah, partially because he hhated drinking from cans, and partially to spite her back proclaimed 'Fine! Then, I don't want the drink!'. The wife's eyes widened as she snatched all of our soda cans from our hands and said that none of us can have any Soda at all. The next day the owner was back.
Luckily, we almost never ran into his wife again.

uuuuhh...

The entire reason I'm writing these blogs is because my ban for a certain game can be lifted. If you want to know what this ban was for, too bad, because it's not something I want to talk about. Instead I'm going to talk about myself.
I'm not the most virtuous of people, but I do what I can to try. But here's the thing: even when I AM virtuous, there is almost always an ulterior motive to it.
One example of this is when I had to serve food to the homeless for one of my Boy Scouts badge requirements. All the adults were talking about me and my friends, about how great it was we were doing community service like this voluntarily. They didn't know there WERE kids like this.
The homeless people we were serving, as well as a few adults supervising were stunned by us. They would come up to us and say 'Wow, it's so great that you're helping your community!' and 'I'm glad kids like you are around.'
My friends and I, of course, were not doing this voluntarily. We were practically forced to do this work, so we naturally felt guilty for taking credit for being nice kids. But we did anyway. At the moment, we felt absolutely horrible about we we did, but we were still children, and, sure enough, we forgot about it in only a few days.
It's not that we didn't care, it's just that we forgot. Once we got what we needed, we couldn't remember anything. Are you bored yet? Well, I guess I'll wrap this up. So, now you know what I mean about not being virtuous.

I'm pretty heartless, huh?

Pinewood Derby Part 2

Continued from yesterday...
Now RACING, however, was a completely different matter.
It is a completely honest and fair contest, where all possible circumstances are taken into consideration.
Or maybe I just think that because one year I won.
Well, technically. You see, I kind of won by default.
No, don't get me wrong, my car was brilliant, but I still came in second.
The first-placer used liquid graphite, instead of the lubricant we were supposed to use. Nobody noticed this for a while. Not until he went to the regional tournament and was discovered.
I still hold a grudge.

Pinewood Derby Part 1

I am a Boy Scout.
As a Boy Scout, I must adhere to the Scout Honors and Rules.
I also must compete in the ridiculous pastime of carving rock-hard blocks of pine wood into a disgustingly complex model car. This pastime is the Pinewood Derby.
When judging the Pinewood Derby, the 'Judges', usually consisting of the troop leader, a bored housewife, and a balding middle aged man, have to rate us based on how well we race our cars, and how well we DECORATE them. This is not only a very bad idea, the judging process is faulty at best. For example, if one child makes a scaled model of a Ferrari, complete with wood polish and paint, it will lose the contest to a block of wood with a skull stapled to it's head named
'Ghost Rider'
Quality doesn't matter to them. It's all about originality!
They encourage Scouts to be WHO THEY ARE!
It makes me sick.

Cont. Tomorrow